Fenton, and his dupe, a weak-headed young Englishman, Whitcombe. Trelawny, after much suffering from his wounds, seized an opportunity of escaping from the cavern, and landed at Cephalonia in September, 1825. The letter to John Hunt, Leigh Hunt's brother, a facsimile of which is given in the present volume, describes the taking of Missolonghi by the Turks in 1826.

In December, 1826, we find him writing to Mrs. Shelley from Zante: "A bountiful will and confined means are a curse, and often have I execrated my fortunes so ill correspond with my wishes. . . . Old age and poverty is a frightful prospect . . . it is the climax of human ill. You may be certain I could not write thus on what I did not feel." In the autumn of 1828 he paid a visit to England, but returned to the Continent in the spring of the following year, feeling out of his element at home, as this characteristic outburst shows: "To whom am I a neighbour, and near whom? I dwell amongst tame and civilized human beings, with somewhat the same feelings as we may guess the lion feels when, torn from his native wilderness, he is tortured into domestic intercourse with what Shakespeare calls 'forked animals,' the most abhorrent to his nature." Abroad, Trelawny seems to have mixed in as good society as at home in his letters he mentions Walter Savage Landor, Kirkup the artist, the Barings, and Charles Brown, the friend of Keats. In October, 1830, Trelawny despatched to Mrs. Shelley the MS. of his "history," published a year afterwards under the title of "Adventures of a Younger Son." Several passages were omitted, as Colburn, the publisher, and Mrs. Shelley, insisted that their license, or, as they termed it, coarseness, would give offence to readers. The following extracts from his letters show how he professed to regard the work: March, 1829.-"I am actually writing my own life. Brown and Landor are

spurring me on, and are to review it sheet by sheet." August, 1830.—"I have nearly completed the first volume of my history. . . . At present I wish the first series to go forth strictly anonymously, and therefore you must on no account trust the publisher with my name." October, 1830.— "Surely there is matter enough in the book to make it interesting, if only viewed in the light of a romance." January, 1831." It has been a painful and arduous undertaking narrating my life. I have omitted a great deal, and avoided being a pander to the public taste for the sake of novelty or effect. . . . My life is not a novel."

The book was published anonymously, Trelawny, with his usual mystery of manner, assuring his correspondent that "if my name is known, and the work can be brought home to me, the consequences will be most disastrous." As Mrs. Shelley was able, three months afterwards, to inform him that his mother was speaking openly in society of his forthcoming memoirs, it must be supposed that he took precautions in time to save himself from these "most disastrous consequences "-the consequences of being convicted of romancing. However much Trelawny may have wished to put his name to his tissue of fact and fiction, he foresaw that such a step would do no good to it, and would give his adversaries an opportunity of attacking his character and veracity. The book naturally rather puzzled the critics, The Literary Gazette remarking, "It is just the wild and reckless journal we could suppose kept by some bold buccaneer," while to The Athenæum it appeared that "the author, in imagining a fictitious autobiography (for we now perceive it can be nothing else) has been misled by sheer ignorance and lack of taste.” The same critical journal was very naturally shocked by the "extreme grossness of the language," considered the hero as "a kind of ruffian from his birth," whose "errors and crimes" were "those

of a savage," and, in sorrowful remonstrance, asked its readers "What is the utility of drawing a character in which there is not a single redeeming point?" It is very justly

held a reviewer's duty, first, to establish his own superiority over the author he is criticizing, and secondly, to respect the prejudices of the readers of his review, and the extracts quoted above show that the anonymous critic was fully alive to what was expected of him. It is, however, only fair to him to allow that there was no well-known name to vouch for the book, that there was, in fact, nothing but the text to prove that it was a work of rare brilliancy, if not of genius. Its passages of bloodshed may offend the squeamish, but then it was no more written for old ladies than for The Athenæum reviewer, to whom its freshness and vigour seemed such sad lack of taste. Its chief fault is inaccuracy in details. Trelawny himself said that it was principally adapted to sailors, but we imagine that seamen could pick holes in the seamanship he displays. Its peculiar merits were perhaps not pleasing to critics of the greatest delicacy and refinement, as it is both unconventional and original. It is real, and yet a romance. How real may be seen by comparing a book of fictitious adventures with it. Let any be chosen," Treasure Island," for example, and admirable as is Mr. Stevenson's piece of work, its characters, its encounters seem pale and shadowy beside the characters and adventures in the "Younger Son." Yet how romantic it is the courtship of Zela, the daring of the Java prince, the adventures in Borneo, are narrated with a poetry and fire that is rare in English prose. The spirit of adventure it raises in the reader is not easily allayed: there are those whom it has sent to sea.

To those who know their Dumas it will appear only natural that a translation of the "Younger Son," with an introduction by the great man, should be found in the list of his writings under the title of "Un Cadet de Famille."